Reformatory

Correctional facility popular during the late 19th and early 20th centuries

A reformatory or reformatory school is a youth detention center or an adult correctional facility popular during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Western countries. In the United Kingdom and United States, they came out of social concerns about cities, poverty, immigration, and gender following industrialization, as well as from a shift in penology to reforming instead of punishing the criminal. They were traditionally single sex institutions that relied on education, vocational training, and removal from the city. There was a perceived rise in juvenile delinquency in the early 19th century; whereas in a rural economy very young children could gain paid employment doing tasks such as bird scaring and stone gathering. These opportunities were not available in the cities. Youngsters were very visible on the streets. In 1816, Parliament set up a ‘Committee for Investigating the Alarming Increase in Juvenile Crime in the Metropolis’, in 1837 the writer Charles Dickens published Oliver Twist, a story about a child involved in a street gang, and in 1847 it was recognised in the Juvenile Offences Act 1847, that children under 14 should be tried in a special court and not an adult court. Begging and vagrancy was rife, and it was these low level misdemeanours that caused the magistrates to send vulnerable youngsters to industrial schools to learn to be industrious, and learn skills that would make then more employable. More serious crimes, required an element of punishment in an environment away from older prisoners, who would have a further negative effect on the youngster, before the task of reforming their ways. The power to set up such an establishment was given in the Youthful Offenders Act 1854 (the Reformatory Schools Act). This provided financial assistance and support for reformatory schools for convicted young offenders as an alternative to prison. From 1824 to 1826 some boys were housed on the prison hulk, Captivity (the former Bellerophon). Even earlier in 1817, Samuel Hoare the Quaker banker and philanthropist and the architect James Bevan, had proposed a new suitable prison: there was no consensus as to whether a prison should be for deterrence, retribution, punishment, removing a cause of nuisance or reforming the prisoner. Parkhurst aimed to reform the prisoner, provide some education and prepare the youngster to be transported as a free man to the colonies in Australia. By 1866 there were 51 certified reform schools in England and 14 in Scotland, but this had declined to 43 in 1913, while certified industrial schools had become more popular moving from 50 in 1866 to 132 (residential) and 21 (dayschools) in 1913.

The regime was strict but fair and humane within the context of the times. Good behaviour was rewarded and poor behaviour punished. Punishment followed rule breaking and rewards followed compliance. The rules were clear and transparent. The morality was simple and this would provide some security as children. Similarly, normal living conditions for the urban poor involved overcrowded multiple occupancy in buildings with no mains drainage where diseases were rife. With no health care available or affordable there was a high death rate amongst the malnourished children. In the reformatory there was simple regular food, the conditions were clean and medical care was available. In addition they were given free education and some training in a skill that would be marketable when they had finished their time. The success rate was high. Two were sentenced to hard labour, but the rest were sent back to the ship and punished with the birch, solitary confinement and a diet of biscuit and water. On shore the Mount St Bernard's RC Reformatory opened in 1856. In the same year there was a mutiny, then in 1864 a riot. In 1870 a boy died. Again in 1875 there was a mutiny where 60 out of 200 boys escaped. Three years later in 1878 there was another mutiny, with a break out and an officer was stabbed. The Akbar was retired in 1910 and the boys moved on shore to the 'Akbar Nautical Training School' at Heswall. The magazine John Bull published a report on the Akbar Scandal, detailing cruel treatment that had apparently led to a number of deaths. It detailed that boys were tortured and there were several deaths. Boys were gagged with blankets before being secured to a birching horse, their trousers removed and then birched with hawthorn branches. The ill boys were considered malingerers and caned. Minor offences were punished with drenching and being forced to stand upright throughout the night; several boys died as a result. The Home Office internal report exonerated the Akbar staff, but this led to a Departmental Committee in 1913 inquiring into punishment practices used, and the welfare of the children with reformatory and industrial schools. which was marked by the first meeting of the National Congress on Penitentiary and Reformatory Discipline in 1870 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Penologists from around the world gathered to consider new visions for imprisonment and collectively endorsed a general aim for reforming prisoners with their Declaration of Principles. Reformatories for women aimed to legislate morality through criminalizing female sexuality, contributing to the creation of the category of "delinquent girl." spearheaded the reformatory movement for women, criticizing the condition of women in traditional correctional facilities, and advocating for separate institutions. At New York's Auburn Prison (1818 – ), for example, female prisoners did not fit into the ascetic penology the facility pioneered. Segregated from the male population in a crowded, unventilated attic above the guard's barracks, not only did they defy the Silent System Auburn enforced, but were also unsupervised, and vulnerable to the predations of male guards. Further, women were not allowed to contribute through manual labor, and were left to languish, locked inside most of the time. Part of the issue was that before the Civil War, women were an extreme minority in United States' prisons: in the mid 1840s, Dorothea Dix recorded a grand total of 167 women in prisons from Maine through Virginia. As Beaumont and De Tocqueville observed in their survey of American Prisons ("On the Penitentiary System in The United States "): It is because they occupy little space in the prison, that they have been neglected. It is the same with most evils of society, a remedy for which is ardently sought if they are important; if they are not alarming they are overlooked. But when a female inmate, secretly five months pregnant, was flogged to death in the early 1830s, progressive activists were livid, and pushed the New York State Legislature to found Mount Pleasant Prison, in Ossining NY, in 1835, the first female prison created by an act of law in the United States. Mount Pleasant and other women's facilities like it aimed to make inmates embody Victorian standards of womanhood, through training in domestic services, and education regarding sexual standards and women's role in society.

The term "reformatory" also has considerable constitutional significance in Canada, as s.92 (6) of the British North America Act, 1867 exclusively reserves powers over reformatories and prisons to provincial jurisdiction, as well as pre trial incarceration for those judged unsuitable for bail. In contrast, s. 91 (28) exclusively reserves powers over penitentiaries and criminal legislation to federal jurisdiction creating an intricately overlapping burden of responsibility In some provinces, particularly British Columbia, pre trial detainees greatly suffer relatively to convicted provincial inmates (or even many federal inmates) Under current law, most juveniles and anyone sentenced to a term of imprisonment up to and including two years less a day will serve time in a provincial prison or reformatory (although they may be released far earlier due to overcrowding or a determination that further incarceration is unjustified). Controversially, the use of "two years less a day" sentences has been used by some judges to avoid mandatory sentences such as deportation, weapons prohibitions, prohibitions to entry to the US, or harsh pardon ineligibility barriers. The use of the terms "prison", "correctional centre", and "reformatory" vary by province and category of offender. In contrast, federal penitentiaries are mostly referred to simply as "institutions". In addition, a person who would face a provincial sentence of incarceration for an offence would face criminal proceedings more directly administered by the province. For example, judges in such proceedings are appointed by the province, rather than superior court justices who are appointed by the federal government (despite most prosecutors, superior court justices, and court costs being paid by the provinces in such cases). Provincial governments also have more leeway to create diversion programs in such cases. Such offences are often prosecuted (if at all) by summary charge and result in relatively minor sentences.